Michael Hudson is Distinguished Processor of Economics at the University of Missouri,
Kansas City,

and the author of many books
on international and domestic finance, including Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance.

They wanted something for nothing. I gave them
nothing for something.

—J.
R. "Yellow Kid" Weil

Social Security,
formerly the "third rail" of American politics, has now been trod upon, in rather dramatic fash­ion, by George W. Bush.
Given that the maneuver is both stupid and un­necessary, one must ask why. After all, the program's alleged deficiencies,
if there are any, will not manifest themselves until at least 2018. This is not quite the same as worrying about the sun's
eventual collapse into a black hole, but for most politicians a problem that lies thirteen years in the future is nearly the
same thing. Clearly all is not what it seems.

Bush himself offers
two reasons for the present boldness. The first—that Social Security is "in crisis"—is easily dismissed.Government actuaries, backed by economists from across the political spectrum, insist there is
no funding problem.
The Social Security Administration will take in more money than it pays out for the next thirteen years; it has built up a
reserve of $1.8 trillion in interest-bearing Treasury bonds for the years after that; and any later shortfall can be covered
easily by even a partial rollback of the re­cent tax cuts for the rich.

Bush's second argument sounds more promising.
If the American people will simply follow his plan, he says, they too will become rich.The way the system works now, the government withholds 12.4 percent of your paycheck, up to $90,000 in annual income.
In return, it promises to provide you a monthly payment—a pension—from the time you turn sixty- two until the time you die. As of this writing,
the administration's alterna­tive remains somewhat nebulous, but what is clear in all of the variations pre­sented
thus far is that you will be able to put some of your paycheck into the stock market. Bush calls these stock purchases "personal
savings accounts."

Bush's opponents note a possible
third reason, which is that he is hoping to roll back the New Deal in favor of smaller government, ft may be true that Bush
dislikes the New Deal, but it is hard to envision his proposed replacement as a small-government alternative. A fed­erally
mandated transfer of funds—whether it is from taxpayer pockets to Treasury bills, as with Social Security, or from taxpayer
pockets to the stock market, as under Bush's pro­posed changes—is still a federally mandated transfer of funds.{Actually, the motive is the dismantling of social services, a pattern started under
Reagan and continued with subsequent Republican presidents.The business community
finds public services not in their interest—they want a cheap, desperate labor force, and lower corporate taxes.--jk}

Vice President Dick
Cheney described the benefits of these personal sav­ings accounts in January. His example was a young woman who put away
$1,000 every year for forty years. The Social Security Administration cur­rently puts her money into Treasury bills, which
at present return about 2 percent, so in forty years that investment would have returned about $61,000. Not too bad. "But
if she invested the money in the stock market," Cheney said, "earning even its lowest historical rate of return, she would
earn more than double that amount—$160,000. If the individual earned the average historical stock market rate of return,
she would have more than $225,000— or nearly four times the amount to be expected from Social Security."2

That's a lot of math. Cheney's main point is that
an upbeat assessment of the stock market—about 7.5 percent annually over forty years, by his reck­oning—would
easily exceed the 2 percent offered by Treasury bills.

There is no arguing
that $225,000 is more than $61,000. On the other hand, it's not as if you get a lump sum from the Social Security Administration
when you retire. The woman Cheney cited could end up taking in much more than $61,000 if she lives long enough. (The average
annual payment to re­tirees today is about $11,000.) Or she could die on her sixty-second birthday. Like any other investment—or
any other form of insurance, for that matter— Social Security is somewhat of a gamble. But then so is the stock market.
By Cheney's estimation, however, today's stock market is a much better bet. "Over time," he concluded, "the securities markets
are the best, safest way to build substantial personal savings."That is the argument, anyway. The stock market is the main
chance in America, and Bush wants to let all of us in on the action.

The one sure mark
of a con, though, is the promise of free money. In

fact, the only way the stock market is going to
grow is if we the people put

a lot more of our money into it. What Bush seeks
to manufacture is a

boom—or, more accurately, a bubble—bankrolled
by the last safe pile of

cash in America today. His plan is a Ponzi scheme,
and in that scheme it is Social Security that is being played for the last sucker.Retirement
savings are by far the most important source of mon­ey on Wall Street. The Federal Reserve Board reports that private
and pub­lic retirement accounts, not including Social Security, had assets of $10 trillion at the end of 2003. Nearly
half of that, $4.7 trillion, was held in stocks. By way of comparison, the total value of all domestic stocks listed on NASDAQ,
the American Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Ex­change at the end of 2003 was about $14.2 trillion.

In the past, few
retirement dollars found their way to Wall Street. IRAs and 401 (k)s had yet to be invented, and few companies offered private
pension plans of any kind. In 1950, General Motors—then, as now, among the largest employers on earth—began to
change that with a new form of com­pensation. The company would withhold money from paychecks, much like the Social Security
Administration was doing, and add money of its own to build up a reserve to pay retirees many decades into the future. Generally
called a "defined benefit" plan, the scheme guaranteed retirees a specific (defined) monthly payment until they died.Other giants of American industry soon followed, and the funds grew quickly. In most
of them, at least half the money was put into the stock market. Workers thus would gain, at least in theory, a stake in the
prosperity of their company, building loyalty to management while also providing com­panies with a captive source of credit—their
own workforce. All of that new cash contributed to the bull market of the 1950s.

Management philosopher
Peter Drucker called this process "pension-fund socialism" and hailed it as the most positive social development of the twentieth
century, because it would at last merge the interests of labor and capital. Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler even wrote
a book called The Capitalist Manifesto announcing that a new epoch of harmony between workers and owners was at hand,
because soon all workers would be owners.

It didn't quite work
out that way. Many companies used retirement re­serves to buy their own stocks, bidding up their share price and allowing
them to take over other firms on favorable terms, especially as mergers and ac­quisitions gained momentum in the 1960s.
The problem was that when com­panies went bankrupt—especially small firms—the collapse also wiped out the
pension funds invested in those companies. Employees of such compa­nies found themselves not only out of work but stripped
of the money they thought was being saved up for their retirement.

Congress moved to limit such behavior by obliging
corporate pension funds to be run by arm's-length trustees, although workers were still permitted (and of­ten encouraged)
to keep their pensions in the stock of their employers. To further protect workers, Congress created the Pension Benefit Guarantee
Corporation (PBGC) in 1974.All
corporate pension plans were re­quired to buy federal insurance, through the PBGC, to protect workers in the event of
a failed investment scheme or corporate bankruptcy. The plans themselves were still prone to risk, but at least the pensions
would be backed by the government and workers could feel se­cure about their retirement.(Former employees of Enron & WorldCom recently learned the price of loyalty.)

Most companies now
offer their employees a broad array of mutual funds instead of just their own stock. In itself this is good common-sense investing
practice, and it also protects fund managersfrom charges of scheming. The
other result of this practice is that workers' fortunes are now tied not just to their own companies but to the market as
a whole, h is where and how we come to both the problem and the scam. While fears regarding the solvency of Social Security
are unwar­ranted, many corporate pension plans—the ones that have been so impor­tant in bankrolling the stock-market
rise of the past few decades—are themselves threatening to go bust, taking their parent companies down with them. The
financial rot already has begun to seep into the airline and steel industries, and the auto sector may be next. (General Motors
re­ports that its current pension obligations add $675 to the cost of every ve­hicle it produces.)

The shortfalls aren't
just a matter of bad luck. For quite a few years now, companies simply haven't been putting away enough money to pay retirees
what they are owed. The PBGC estimates that the under funding of tradi­tional defined-benefit plans, for instance, deepened
by $100 billion last year, to a total of $450 billion.

The problem was created by fund managers and CFOs who believed— or at least
pretended to believe—that pension reserves could grow at fantastic rates of return forever. Milliman USA, a benefits
consulting firm, reports on the assumed rates of return on pension investments at the hun­dred largest firms in America.
How high did these companies bet? In 2000 and 2001, the median projected rate of return was 9.5 percent. In 2002 it was 9.25
percent. And in 2003 it was 8.55 percent.

These are wildly optimistic projections, even by
Dick Cheney's standards. Last summer the Financial Times noted that they conflict not only with pres­ent reality
but with warnings from such mainstream investment experts as Peter Bernstein, Jeremy Siegel, and Jeremy Grantham that "we
have entered a low-return environment" and that as a result many investors are expect­ing long-term returns closer to
7 percent or 5 percent. Even these rates seem overly exuberant, given that the top hundred corporate pension funds earned
an average annual investment return of just 1.3 percent between the end of 1999 and the end of 2003 (a 3-year Treasury bill
would have earned 6%).

At the beginning
of 2001, for instance, IBM proposed that it would earn $6.3 billion on pension-fund assets of $61 billion—about 10 percent.
This was an astonishing demonstration of confidence given that IBM had earned only $1.2 billion on those assets the previous
year. In the event, IBM actually went on to lose $4 billion in 2001. Barely daunted, the com­pany's managers predicted
a 9.5 percent return in 2002. They lost another $7 billion. In 2003 they predicted a return of $6 billion, and—as the
market began to recover—they at last beat their prediction, by $4.4 billion. The result of this "recovery" is that,
since George W. Bush took office, IBM's pension-fund assets have plummeted by more than $1 billion. Nonethe­less, corporate
fund managers across America re­main optimistic.

Such errors in judgment
are seldom acciden­tal. In pretending that their funds could gener­ate high returns, managers sought a real—albeit
short-term—advantage. The faster companies projected their funds to grow, the less they had to set aside to pay their
retirees. The lower set-asides in turn allowed them to report higher earnings, thereby driving up the price of the company's
own stock to "create shareholder value." Faced with a choice between living up to their pension promises or reporting higher
net earnings, companies simply decided not to live up to their employee agreements.

The practice is not
one that can be sustained across forty years. It is a kind of Ponzi scheme, in which present profits are paid for by the promise
of future stock-market gains. At some point retirees are going to want the money they are owed. The last few years have seen
the results of these broken promises in the form of lawsuits, bankruptcy, and, ultimately, retirees being forced to live on
far less than they were promised.

In the end, it is
the PBGC that pays when the plans go bust. Here, however, the problem deepens considerably, because picking up the total bill
for the corporate sector's underfunding would bankrupt the PBGC itself.Last November the PBGC reported that although it had "operated for
sev­eral years with virtually no claims," the end of the stock-market boom has given way to "a period of record-breaking
claims." As recently as 2001, the PBGC had a surplus of $8 billion, but a series of bankruptcy cases pushed it $23 billion
into deficit last year, a year in which it took in only $1.5 bil­lion in premiums. The PBGC would need more than fifteen
years just tomake up its current deficit, if there weren’t
new claims.The PBGC has proposed that companies follow more realistic accounting
rules and pay premiums that reflect the true risks of their under-funding. It also is asking for stricter limits on the ability
of companies to escape their pension debts by de­claring bankruptcy.However, Congress following suggestions from an organization
of pension-fund manager persuaded regulators to even further loosen the requirements that companies estimate realistic rates
of future returns.Without such changes the PBGC will be forced into bankruptcy and the
government will have to bail it out. That could cost as much as $95 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.
At that point only today's profits would remain private. The losses will have
been fully socialized—as occurred with the S&P, $200 billion bail out.

Barring some sudden influx of capital, something has to give— either the hopes of retirees or the hopes of the
stock market. Unfortunate­ly, this is a zero-sum game in which many Americans are on both sides at once. Higher pension
set-asides will diminish corporate earnings. Lowered earnings in turn will lead to dividend cuts and job losses. Low dividends
and high employment will decrease the demand for stocks—leading to further declines in the ability of pension funds
to pay retirees, with more defaults all around. Workers, retirees, investors, and taxpayers thus find themselves yoked to
the fortunes of the financial managers who created this situation.

This is hardly the
kind of happy pension-fund socialism that Peter Drucker had in mind, in which worker-owners share risks and rewards alike
as they create the goods and services demanded by a thriving mar­ketplace. In fact, what has happened is that companies
have made a great effort not merely to share the risk but to off-load it entirely onto the backs of their employees, the government,
and taxpayers in general.

This phenomenon of
risk rolling downward can be seen most clearly in the move by many companies from defined-benefit programs—in which
employees are guaranteed a specific retirement payment, based on their salary history—to "defined-contribution plans,"
in which workers know nothing else except how much is being deducted from their paychecks. The payout rate is decided by how
well the stock market performs, which shifts the risk onto employees even as it frees up more revenue for their employers
and generates rich commissions for money managers. The risk flows down the economic scale even as the cash flows up.

Given the widespread
problems confronting pensions outside the em­brace of the federal government, now would seem an odd time for the ad­ministration
to campaign for Social Security privatization. Why would anyone want to invest America's last line of pension defense in so
perilous a market? Are Bush and his advisers unaware of the odds?Probably not.
Therefore, they must have a particular idea in mind. Pre­sumably they believe that some kind of market recovery is needed
not only to rescue the PBGC but to rescue the pension funds, to rescue the stock market, and, for that matter, to rescue the
political fortunes of the ruling party—that what is needed, in fact, is a Bush boom. After all, such a boom would allow
us to "grow our way out of trouble," as we have done so many times before.

But where will the
funds come from to bid up stock prices? The nation­al savings rate is nearly zero, because most personal discretionary
in­come—like that of most companies—is absorbed in repaying debts. Previ­ously, the Fed could have flooded
the capital markets with credit to lower interest rates and thereby spur a bond and stock market bubble. But interest rates
are at their lowest since the 1950s. They can go no lower.[i]There is only one other place to turn. The new flow of funds into thestock market will have to come from labor itself, just as it did back in the 1950s.
Social Security is the greatest plum of all, so large as to virtually guarantee
a boom.

Talk of bubbles has
become popular in recent years, but most dis­cussions miss the key point. Although optimism is inherent in the human spirit,
it rarely effloresces into the kind of frenzy necessary to float a bub­ble without help from the government. In fact,
many of history's most fa­mous bubbles have been sponsored by governments in order to get out of debt. Britain, in 1711,
persuaded bondholders to swap their bonds for stocks in the South Sea Company, which was expected to get rich off the growth
industry of its day, the African slave trade. By the time the South Sea bubble collapsed, the government had indeed paid off
its war debt— and speculators were left holding worthless "growth sector" stocks. In 1716, John Law organized France's
Mississippi bubble along the same lines, retir­ing France's public debt by selling shares to create slave-stocked planta­tions
in the Louisiana territories. It worked, for a while.

The U.S. government is now attempting to run the
same kind of scam. Bush would like to persuade Social Security claimants to exchange the se­curity of U.S. Treasury bonds
for a chance to buy growth stocks on which a much higher return is hoped for. No modern blue-sky venture comparable to the
South Sea or Mississippi companies is needed. The stock market it­self has become a bubble, borne aloft from the burden
of generating actual goods and services by a constant flow of new retirement dollars.

There is no denying that channeling trillions of
Social Security dollars into the stock market would produce short-term gains. But once this mon­ey is spent, the markets
are likely to retreat. That is what happens after a fi­nancial bubble. Then we will be right back where we are today,
only much the poorer and with no guaranteed pension system for elderly Americans— who will, of course, need guaranteed
pensions more than ever as they watch their stock holdings continue to shed value. Indeed, many other countries are just now
recovering from their own dismal experiences with what Augusto Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher called "labor capitalism" and
Bush calls, with no apparent irony, an "ownership society."

In the 1930s, John
Maynard Keynes urged governments to run budget deficits in order to increase the economy's spending power on goods and ser­vices.
His point of reference was the "real economy"—the economy of pro­duction and consumption, of investment in capital
and in the labor to oper­ate that capital. Whereas Keynes spoke of governments priming the pump with public spending programs
to get domestic investment and employment go­ing, Bush now seeks to prime the stock-market pump with Social Security con­tributions.[ii]It is the next natural step from
our real economy to the econo­my of dreams.

[i]After World War II interest rates rose to a peak,
in 1980, of more than 21 percent. The result was nearly four decades of capital losses on bonds—whose interest rates
are fixed at the time you buy them—and a steady rise in stocks. Since 1980, however, interest rates have fallen back,
creating the greatest bond-market boom in history

[ii]The genius of recent administrations, Democratic
and Republican, has been to trans­fer inflation to the stock market—that is, to the prices of stocks and bonds instead
of to the prices of labor and production. Real wages today are lower than they were in 1964.

A second article. Notice the quality of reporting in the socialist press. I wash the same could be said about
the main-stream press.

Business wants to raise the value of their stocks buy having money that would go to Social Security go instead into
the stock markets.Both President Clinton and Bush support this plan, and both
have appointed a commission that made such recommendation—jk.

By Shannon Jones11 August 2001

The Social Security commission appointed by President George W. Bush has unanimously adopted a staff report calling
for the diversion of Social Security funds into the stock market. The plan for
individual retirement accounts being advanced by the White House is but a thinly veiled attempt to sharply cut back or eliminate guaranteed federally supported pensions for retired and disabled people.

On July 19 the commission issued an interim report that claimed Social Security was “broken” and warned
of an impending financial crisis unless Congress adopts its proposals. It pointed to the year 2016 as a “critical juncture”
when current projections indicate that Social Security benefit payments will begin to exceed revenues because of the retirement
of large numbers of those born in the postwar “baby boom.”

The so-called Commission to Strengthen Social Security is comprised entirely of
supporters of privatization. It is co-chaired by Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons and former Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan. Bush created
the panel to lay the groundwork for a legislative assault on the retirement program. Big business is determined to claw back
hundreds of billions of dollars currently used to subsidize retirees and disabled people and pour them into the stock markets.

The report of the Social Security commission contains many deceptions and outright
lies.
The claim that the diversion of a portion of Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts will strengthen the system
is false. In fact the opposite is the case. While such accounts guarantee a windfall
for Wall Street banks and brokerage houses, they will increase, not decrease, the insecurity of those depending on Social
Security. Further, the proposal to divert one-sixth of Social Security taxes to private accounts would push forward to 2007
the date at which revenues could no longer cover benefit payments.The reason is that benefits are paid for by contribution; reduce contributions and benefits are reduced—jk.

In testimony before the House Budget Committee on July 27, Henry Aaron, an economist with the Brookings Institute,
warned that the proposed changes could result in a disastrous decline in benefits, especially for poorer sections of the working
class. “Under the Bush plan,” he said, “cuts in combined Social Security and individual account benefits
for married, low earners who receive lower than average returns on their individual accounts could approach 50 percent.”

By claiming that a crisis is imminent the Bush administration seeks to whip up a panic atmosphere where cuts packaged
as reform can be pushed through before millions of workers realize what is happening. By means of statistical tricks the commission’s
report seeks to build the case that Social Security discriminates against poor people, women and minorities, the very groups
who have the most to lose if the system is dismantled.The claim of crisis is based on not counting the T-bills which SS holds as assets.Bush called it worthless paper in a speech—jk.

The report goes so far as to suggest that the US government might default on its obligations to the Social Security
trust fund, which is held in the form of US Treasury bonds, rather than raise taxes or cut back spending in other areas. It
is estimated that money accumulated in the Social Security trust fund is sufficient to sustain payment of benefits at current
levels until 2038. To keep the system solvent after that point only relatively modest
changes would be required.

The report asserts, however, that the securities held by the trust fund are only paper claims and have no real value.
Said Stanford University economist John Cogan, a commission member and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget
under President Reagan, “That’s right, it’s gone—yes, yes, yes.”

Imagine for a minute the howls if the government raised the specter of a default on its obligations to redeem government
securities held by the banking and corporate sector! But the prospect of the government
reneging on its obligations to tens of millions of working people whose lives would be ruined by a default raises few eyebrows
in the big business press.

If a danger exists to the solvency of the Social Security fund, it is largely due to the fact that the government has dipped into the multitrillion-dollar surplus to pay for its massive military budget and other expenditures
and subsidize huge tax breaks for the wealthy.

Any threat to Social Security will be exacerbated by the tax cut signed into law by Bush two months ago, which amounts
to $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years and $4.1 trillion over the following 20 years. During the debate on the tax cut the
Bush administration and the Republicans dismissed concerns that a large tax giveaway to the rich would undermine the solvency
of Social Security.

This underscores the point that a major purpose of the tax cut was to starve the federal treasury, forcing an early
assault on Social Security, Medicare and all remaining social programs. The fact that the Democrats acquiesced to the massive
tax cut makes them accomplices of the plans to gut Social Security.

In fact, important sections of the Democratic Party, which has until now generally opposed, at least in public, substantial
changes to Social Security, have come out in support of diverting a portion of the system’s funds into the stock market.
Speaking at a news conference July 24, Representative Ellen Tauscher of California called for investing 10
to 13 percent of the Social Security surplus in stocks. She was joined by Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who advocated placing
Social Security money in mutual funds.

In a July 29 editorial in the Washington Post, Jeffrey Liebman, a former assistant to Bill Clinton on economic
policy, while claiming to oppose cuts to the system, made a major concession to the Bush plan. He called individual accounts
the only realistic means of strengthening Social Security “in the current political climate.”

Meanwhile Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle suggested that Democrats could support a pilot project that would allow
some investment by the government in the market.

One conservative Democrat, Representative Charles Stenhom of Texas, has co-sponsored a bill
with Republican Jim Kolbe of Arizona calling for individual accounts, cuts in benefits, reduced cost-of-living adjustments
and an accelerated increase in the retirement age to 67. Benefits would be reduced further in line with any increase in average
life expectancy. The plan is widely seen as a stalking horse for specific cuts the Bush-appointed Social Security commission
is likely to propose.

The Social Security commission appointed by President George W. Bush has unanimously adopted a staff report calling
for the diversion of Social Security funds into the stock market. The plan for
individual retirement accounts being advanced by the White House is but a thinly veiled attempt to sharply cut back or eliminate guaranteed federally supported pensions for retired and disabled people.

On July 19 the commission issued an interim report that claimed Social Security was “broken” and warned
of an impending financial crisis unless Congress adopts its proposals. It pointed to the year 2016 as a “critical juncture”
when current projections indicate that Social Security benefit payments will begin to exceed revenues because of the retirement
of large numbers of those born in the postwar “baby boom.”

The so-called Commission to Strengthen Social Security is comprised entirely of
supporters of privatization. It is co-chaired by Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons and former Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan. Bush created
the panel to lay the groundwork for a legislative assault on the retirement program. Big business is determined to claw back
hundreds of billions of dollars currently used to subsidize retirees and disabled people and pour them into the stock markets.

The report of the Social Security commission contains many deceptions and outright
lies.
The claim that the diversion of a portion of Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts will strengthen the system
is false. In fact the opposite is the case. While such accounts guarantee a windfall
for Wall Street banks and brokerage houses, they will increase, not decrease, the insecurity of those depending on Social
Security. Further, the proposal to divert one-sixth of Social Security taxes to private accounts would push forward to 2007
the date at which revenues could no longer cover benefit payments.The reason is that benefits are paid for by contribution; reduce contributions and benefits are reduced—jk.

In testimony before the House Budget Committee on July 27, Henry Aaron, an economist with the Brookings Institute,
warned that the proposed changes could result in a disastrous decline in benefits, especially for poorer sections of the working
class. “Under the Bush plan,” he said, “cuts in combined Social Security and individual account benefits
for married, low earners who receive lower than average returns on their individual accounts could approach 50 percent.”

By claiming that a crisis is imminent the Bush administration seeks to whip up a panic atmosphere where cuts packaged
as reform can be pushed through before millions of workers realize what is happening. By means of statistical tricks the commission’s
report seeks to build the case that Social Security discriminates against poor people, women and minorities, the very groups
who have the most to lose if the system is dismantled.The claim of crisis is based on not counting the T-bills which SS holds as assets.Bush called it worthless paper in a speech—jk.

The report goes so far as to suggest that the US government might default on its obligations to the Social Security
trust fund, which is held in the form of US Treasury bonds, rather than raise taxes or cut back spending in other areas. It
is estimated that money accumulated in the Social Security trust fund is sufficient to sustain payment of benefits at current
levels until 2038. To keep the system solvent after that point only relatively modest
changes would be required.

The report asserts, however, that the securities held by the trust fund are only paper claims and have no real value.
Said Stanford University economist John Cogan, a commission member and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget
under President Reagan, “That’s right, it’s gone—yes, yes, yes.”

Imagine for a minute the howls if the government raised the specter of a default on its obligations to redeem government
securities held by the banking and corporate sector! But the prospect of the government
reneging on its obligations to tens of millions of working people whose lives would be ruined by a default raises few eyebrows
in the big business press.

If a danger exists to the solvency of the Social Security fund, it is largely due to the fact that the government has dipped into the multitrillion-dollar surplus to pay for its massive military budget and other expenditures
and subsidize huge tax breaks for the wealthy.

Any threat to Social Security will be exacerbated by the tax cut signed into law by Bush two months ago, which amounts
to $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years and $4.1 trillion over the following 20 years. During the debate on the tax cut the
Bush administration and the Republicans dismissed concerns that a large tax giveaway to the rich would undermine the solvency
of Social Security.

This underscores the point that a major purpose of the tax cut was to starve the federal treasury, forcing an early
assault on Social Security, Medicare and all remaining social programs. The fact that the Democrats acquiesced to the massive
tax cut makes them accomplices of the plans to gut Social Security.

In fact, important sections of the Democratic Party, which has until now generally opposed, at least in public, substantial
changes to Social Security, have come out in support of diverting a portion of the system’s funds into the stock market.
Speaking at a news conference July 24, Representative Ellen Tauscher of California called for investing 10
to 13 percent of the Social Security surplus in stocks. She was joined by Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who advocated placing
Social Security money in mutual funds.

In a July 29 editorial in the Washington Post, Jeffrey Liebman, a former assistant to Bill Clinton on economic
policy, while claiming to oppose cuts to the system, made a major concession to the Bush plan. He called individual accounts
the only realistic means of strengthening Social Security “in the current political climate.”

Meanwhile Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle suggested that Democrats could support a pilot project that would allow
some investment by the government in the market.

One conservative Democrat, Representative Charles Stenhom of Texas, has co-sponsored a bill
with Republican Jim Kolbe of Arizona calling for individual accounts, cuts in benefits, reduced cost-of-living adjustments
and an accelerated increase in the retirement age to 67. Benefits would be reduced further in line with any increase in average
life expectancy. The plan is widely seen as a stalking horse for specific cuts the Bush-appointed Social Security commission
is likely to propose.

One of the benefits for business to raise
the age of social security is to further flood the job market, which will result in further reduction of income for all but
the top 2%--jk.

To Bush page on ADULT cartoon site

To Bush page on ADULT cartoon site

The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, MD.Absolutely
the best book on profits and drugs for it reveals—without being technical and tedious--more about the
workings of the profit system and its relationship to government than all others—and it’s available on audio CD.
(1-20)

The skeptic is one who judges all things according to the evidence.Many things are widely affirmed by the common herd in a degree well beyond what the evidence supports.The humanistic skeptic applies a second measure, that of harm resulting from such beliefs.Issues of economics and politics,
of religion, quackery, and of psychology and personal behavior top our list.Education and scientific psychology are gateways to the following the dictates of reason.